A magazine reporter asked me:
> It appears the entertainment
> world took a shining to immersive imaging around 2000-2001, as in Sony's
> experiment with PlayStation and NBC's broadcast of NBA games... why did
> the technology fail to catch in these uses? Was it just too expensive?
My overly-long answer that was not used:
I would guess that it was both too expensive and too difficult.
In production, it would require new expensive complicated multi-lens devices. [It would also obsolete the already-purchased cameras any production company's business plan would have accounted for as a long-term amortization.]
Even worse, I am sure the logistics of filming a scene from multiple angles simultaneously proved to be a nightmare.
Blocking the action and moving one camera with one point of view is tough enough: trying to have multiple things going so that the viewer could pivot the POV while things were happening would be all-but impossible.
And there is the issue of a star's appearance and vanity that is also coming to light now with HD: stars look great... When shot at certain angles with exacting lighting and filters etc -- not when lighting and angles are haphazard.
Distribution would also be difficult: I don't know what the increased storage would be, but it could have been 6-12x or whatever number of lenses were shooting each scene, right? Each would have captured a separate video stream.
On playback, it must have required significant processing power, to either merge the separate videos into what would appear as one continuous environment -- or even if that "merging" was done on the production end, to decode and present that immersive environment on a player would be more taxing than just running a single-POV movie.
And most importantly: I'd bet the end result just was not compelling enough to warrant all those added costs and difficulties.
While I loved that GG Bridge demo I told you about, and would have paid for it, and more for a similar drive through SF, for example -- I would not want to watch a whole movie that way. The point of a movie director is that he directs your attention, after all, in a way to make the most involving, compelling entertainment. If every scene allowed/required me to look all around to maybe catch the important action, it would be like a game, or worse, it would be work, not fun. I might do it once, but not as often as I would just relax and watch a single-POV movie. This is the same argument against interactive TV: people *like* passive entertainment. Many if not most of us don't like video games, at least not often.
And as for the NBA thing -- I always thought that was flat out silly. When you watch just about any sport, you want to look at ONE spot -- where the action is -- follow that ball. Why would you want to pivot your view around? Maybe ONCE pre-game to take in the stadium or something. But how often during game play does someone in the audience look away from the ball to to scan the bleachers?
Geez, I've written a book here and I'm still eating breakfast!
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